Breadvans back in vogue: Citymapper starts a bus service

For two days only some green minibuses are appearing on the streets of central London......Citymapper, the website and app preferred by many a Londoner for their directional and travel needs, is running a free bus service numbered CMX1 between the Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges.  It operates on Tuesday 9 and Wednesday 10 May 2017 and is free.

A one way loop is operated.

Vehicle of choice is the Mercedes Sprinter.

So, needing to travel from Southwark to Victoria at lunchtime I decided to take the free Citymapper bus.  The buses (three of them) were visible on the Citymapper website, but despite a lot of hype about better routing and responding to consumer demand, there was no 'on demand' element: rather I went to one of the conventional TfL bus stops the special service was running from.

The bus arrives.  First thing I did was to work out the legalities of operation.  Thankfully an O-disc and legals were carried for Impact Group, who are a large operator of corporate/school contract services in west London.  I don't know much more about Impact but that seems a good place to start.  The chap nearest the camera stood in the bus stop was wearing an Impact jacket: instantly knew what I was doing, being a stones throw from Transport for London offices etc.....BT66UAS is fleet number CMS02.

Inside it looks like a minibus with a large screen displaying the route.....

....next stop, expected journey time, and some marketing gumph.

This Sprinter has standard bus seats, in corporate Citymapper green, and were equipped with USB charging points.  This seemed to garner a lot of favour with passengers, although these are available on pretty much any new bus should the operator specify them.  A number of passengers asked about wifi, and were surprised Citymapper didn't have it. This actually says a lot about expectations of a tech company.  And again wifi is available on any bus if the operator asks for it. 

 

Citymapper employees were gathering user feedback.  There was more feedback about the Citymapper app rather than buses in particular,  The Citymapper employee (in green if course) was a lawyer by trade.

I left the bus initially at stop R at Somerset House, shown above.  When I later tried to continue my journey it turns out the service doesn't actually stop there.  Important lesson for Citymapper: make sure drivers know the stops.  After making my way to the correct stop I was admonished by the driver for not signalling clearly enough I wanted the bus - yet my previous driver had stopped at every stop and opened the doors irrespective.  Further there is still a long way to go in getting a consistent customer service ethic amongst bus drivers.

A short piece to camera.  Not sure who this is but sure it will appear on the Londonist or somesuch tonight!

Citymapper have generated an amazing amount of publicity for themselves with this exercise.  It features on many London and tech blogs as well as mainstream press such as the Evening Standard, the Telegraph, Time Out, and City AM. 

The driver is the hero!  When he's not instructing me on how to hail a bus that is!

On my return from Somerset House to Southwark our bus was regulated on Westminster Bridge.  Seems Citymapper have probably learnt it's not that easy to run a reliable bus service despite choosing a nice simple loop!

And then everything that's bad about conventional bus regulation gets repeated!

Because at the end of the day any attempt to 'reinvent' the bus is still running on the same roads as every other bus!

The route CMX1, a 'pop up' bus route is not a bus route that anyone will ever operate: everywhere it goes is walkable, and there are plenty of conventional buses for the busy bits.  They are talking about technology: the driver is equipped with an Ipad in lieu of a ticket machine, and they talk about regulating headway by speeding up or slowing down.  I think this is a red herring: in London you either drive or you don't!  This project apparently has Transport for London's blessing so it [probably] isn't about starting new bus routes. 


It probably isn't about demand responsive bus routes either - the smaller vehicle may be more nimble but not that much more nimble.  I think an attempt at demand-responsive buses in London would get to a point where it becomes more efficient to operate larger vehicles to a fixed route on a high frequency - i.e. the London bus network!

Some of the marketing and reporting linked above talks about reinventing the bus.  This sort of talk will probably grab the attention of millenials, and a good proportion of older frustrated bus users too.  But what is 'reinventing the bus'?  If we can't go any quicker, and we can't go any cheaper (London bus fares are the lowest in the country) what do we mean by reinvent?  A bus is a bus is a bus.  Occasionally new ones appear with a shiney coat of red paint and a new style of headlight cluster, but before long it's a grubby red bus and that new body style is common.

Citymapper must have quickly learnt that any attempt to change those things which annoy passengers needs more than an internal flat screen and funky green paint.  Traffic, congestion, and bunching affected Citymapper as much as it affects any one of the other 8,000 buses on the road in London.  On one trip our American lawyer host told us we were waiting because of a phenomenon called 'bus bunching'.  When a young girl from a tech start up tells you this is strangely more acceptable than a middle aged male driving a red double decker!  The upshot of this is 'reinventing the bus' is getting back to basics: the bus turns up when the timetable, website, journey planner, app, etc, tells you it will, and the journey time is whatever that medium has told you it will be.  Next stage is to reduce journey time, making buses - and public transport as a concept - more attractive.  That takes a lot of political will to deliver!

So, what are Citymapper up to?  Well, whatever it is they have invested in three brand new buses for it. I think they are on a data collection exercise.  I think they have an open ended project (with a few hundred K budget) to go and generate data on whatever they feel would help them evolve.  And that is understanding the constituent parts of a bus journey in more detail than they do now.  What affects journey speeds - traffic, signals, road design, driver behaviour, customer behaviour.

Or, maybe they do want to be the new urban transit option.  Tech companies that do transit (Uber, etc) are increasingly part of the mainstream transport network, working with and sharing data with local authorities rather than working against them.  May, just maybe, Citymapper wants a bit of that?

More main stream bus operators are also trying to reinvent the bus, or at least the minibus.

Another demand responsive operation with 66-plate Sprinters is Stagecoach Little & Often, which started this year in Ashford, Kent.

Arriva are trialling demand responsive buses in Sittingbourne, branded Arriva Click.  These Mercedes Sprinters are notable for their single leaf entry and rear tail lift for mobility impaired customers.  They also have a gorgeous leather interior!

Demand responsive minibuses gather en-masse at Chisinau bus station!

Any opinions expressed are mine and mine only and NOT those of any of the excellent organisations I work for!